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The Conference on Communication and Argumentation in the Public Sphere is organized by a research team affiliated to 'Dunărea de Jos' University, Galaţi, Romania, on whose premises the conference is to be held.

Call for Papers

Première Circulaire et Appel à Communications

Topic Areas - communication in the public space - verbal communication vs non-verbal communication in the public space - argumentation in institutional contexts - argumentative practice in public space - persuasion strategies in verbal communication - cooperation and conflict in the public space - approaches to public discourse - communication with the individual and the group - discourse analysis - public space discourse - conversational approaches - narrow linguistic issues relevant to the general topic - evidentiality in verbal communication - Verbal communication and argumentation in the Public Space (Pannel) - Pragma-dialectical approaches to argumentation (sub-pannel) - Evidentiality and argumentation (special sub-pannel) - Dissociation (special sub-pannel)

50 years after the publication of Chaim Perelman's and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Treatise on Argumentation (1958) the theme of our Third Conference - also suggested to be a theme for next year's conference - is in Search of a New New Rhetoric with a Special Panel on Argumentation and Sub-panels on Argumentation and Evidentiality Dissociation

The purpose of the conference is to provide background for productive discussion and peer evaluation for Humanities and Social Sciences colleagues who are interested in presenting their work to an audience and meeting people from related fields.

Participation of colleagues in the previous to conferences on Communication and Argumentation in the Public Sphere was a pleasure and an honor for us.

Some changes have been made in the conference format, which is more or less the following: - Twenty to thirty papers will be selected from the submitted proposals to be presented in successive (and not concurrent) sessions. - The conference presentation languages are: English, French and Romanian - Presentations last 20-25 minutes, followed by questions and answers (5-10 minutes). - Publication of submitted and accepted papers is possible only in English or French, following scientific review.

The next announcements on the conference Web will include further details on fee payment, conference program and accommodation arrangements. Registered participants whose papers have been accepted for presentation will be informed of any posting on CAPS3 Web.

The official languages of the conference will be English, French, and Romanian.

The topic of the conference is the investigation of concept types of nouns and verbs and their respective relationships to frames. Frames provide a recursive device for representing knowledge about arbitrary objects and categories by means of attributes and their values. They offer a flexible way of representing concepts of different types in language, philosophy and sciences at different levels of detail and at different stages of development or processing. The interdisciplinary conference combines approaches from linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, philosophy of science, and the history of science.

Linguistic Perspectives: Nouns in natural language correspond to different basic types of concepts. Sortal nouns (e.g. 'cow', 'table', 'adjective') constitute the unmarked type of nouns; individual nouns (e.g. 'Mary', 'pope', 'moon') and functional nouns (e.g. 'mother', 'head', 'size') are marked in being inherently unique; relational nouns (e.g. 'son', 'leg', 'modifier') and functional nouns are marked by involving one or more additional arguments. The linguistic perspective on noun types includes determination in general and productive type shifts, as both permit systematic transitions between types of nouns. The types of nouns can be modelled by frames of different types. A second focus is on verbs: dimensional verbs such as 'cost', 'last', 'widen', and 'cool' can incorporate functional concepts as well. Moreover, verbs also lend themselves naturally to a frame account of lexical meaning. A systematic frame analysis of verb and noun meanings promises a substantial contribution to theories of both syntactic and semantic composition. Among the different concept types, functional concepts are of particular interest since they directly correspond to attributes in frames. Therefore, they play a central role not only in linguistics but in conceptual and theoretical evolution in general.

Philosophical and Cognitive Perspectives: Frames, in Barsalou's sense, are recursive attribute-value structures. While frames can be used to implement individual and sortal concepts, their attributes can themselves be analysed as recursively interrelated functional concepts. Given that frames are the basic format of concept formation in cognition, attributes and frames might have neural correlates in our brains. Frames are a natural linguistic and conceptual format for the representation of complex ontologies that embody substance-accidence and part-whole relations. Of particular interest is the relation of frames to complex representational formats such as conceptual spaces and mental models. Functional concepts and frames play a crucial role in the human evolution of a stable cognitive framework for communication and cooperation, in everyday life, as well as in science. Insofar as the objects of scientific disciplines are defined in terms of underlying frames, Kuhnian paradigm shifts are related to changes in the frames employed in science.